Meta

Dear reader, cast your mind back to the time when you first wanted to put some information on a website.

You had to trust the crusty programmer types, and if you wanted changes they wouldn’t necessarily be able to do them at any great speed. This was fine in the stone age, around the year 2000 or probably earlier. Then, one day, the technology started to catch up with the aspirations and everything had to be done at internet speed. So crusty developed less crusty tools that let things happen quite a bit quicker.

We suddenly had content that people created for themselves. Never to be outdone the constant search for simple generic solutions to be everything meant that the companies that made the very expensive PC based tools for document management had a go at creating something. Some of their original big corporate customers kept on with them. These systems don’t work for the internet, except when you are creating some kind of library, which is the metaphor they started with.

The more considered approach was to treat managing content like it was a solved problem. The content management system (CMS) was born (or at least became more mainstream) and allowed you to manage your catalogue in one place so you could, you know, sell your stuff to people that wanted it.

Then we fell victim to the illusion of best practice. Problems are in a space where they seem to be the same, so we (software engineers, academics and other people who should know better) develop generic solutions. I mean, content is just abstract stuff that we let those tricky user types create so they can pay us. We can just pull something open source or off the shelf and say off you go to them and get back to important stuff like arguing over which 20 year old text editor is best.

But here’s the thing. The pattern user -> catalogue -> put catalog on the interwebs in front of customers is the same, but the user / business / enterprise is most definitely not. Most (not all) open source CMS were created for a small community to share info – they do that really well. However, a commercial company that sells white goods does not have even remotely the same needs as one that sells online holidays where the stock is a multi lingual database of hotels they have a relationship with. They need content management, the thing, but not in the same way, and the OSS solution is probably completely wrong. Also – you don’t want your site to look exactly like your competitors or you are competing on price, which is suicide.

Human beings are subject to pareidolia. Seeing patterns that aren’t there in the data. This is also related to clustering, confirmation and congruence biases. When it meant running away from the wind in the grass because you thought it was a lion that was ok. Now we look for levers to fix and change things that often don’t exist. Eric Reiss calls this robots in the Lean Startup. He cites the case when the US manufacturers couldn’t work out how the Japanese were getting such massive productivity gains so they went to see and saw robots. After a robot installing frenzy the US was still far behind. The Japanese spent a lot of energy understanding how they did things first and put the automation in where it made sense, gradually, and always testing the results, for their specific needs. Good practice, but hard to emulate without a complete culture change. Pareidolia (and the other biases) put robots inside processes that were still broken. In knowledge work this is even easier because adopting the latest fad is only the cost of a couple of books and some (more) training, until your organisation fails catastrophically. Danger, Will Robinson.

Best practice only works in very simple environments where all of the problems are completely understood. Buying a CMS from someone assumes that they understand your needs properly. They probably don’t. It’s dangerous.

Good practice means the using the skills of analysing the problem properly and divining the principles you should follow. A company should control its own content; after all that’s what it’s selling. This means layout, search, everything. However you might use a markup language and a standard group of elements for layout to make it easy for non-web heads to create that content. Find levers for the easy stuff, for the things that do have generic solutions that work.

Startups don’t want to spend money on stuff like a CMS that is tailored to their needs and will tend to go for the OSS solution. I think that they need to start small and find out what those needs are, just like everything in the lean approach. So don’t buy one, and don’t slavishly pull in an OSS one that will bite you and turn out to be an expensive mistake. Create something as simple as possible that meets your needs, then you will know what the needs are and where the pain is. Then you can use good practice to get to where you want to be. Then you can find the metaphor that works for you, and let your competitors try and shoe horn someone else’s into places they don’t work.

Good practice is searching for the right metaphors and being patient enough to wait for them to appear. And, of course, those metaphors are the ones that work for you, might not be right for someone else.